The government placing something on your car to record/transmit your location is an "unreasonable search" - the gov't has no right to put anything on your car, be it a bumper sticker or GPS tracker... The fourth ammendment covers unreasonable searches, how does it not apply? Would any person think it reasonable for the gov't to place a tracking (or really ANY) device on your personal property?
What about the GPS tracker example is so exceptional that it is outside the scope of the Constitution?
The quoted poster (who I lacked the will to scroll back far enough to respond to directly) wrote:
Indeed, no candidate seeking public office at the Federal level has had a hope of winning that office without the support of the broadcast networks, whose unconstitutionality is so ignored by Australia's Rupert Murdoch and FOX NEWS (for obvious reasons).
That people solely rely on mass media outlets to inform their opinions is not "unconstitutional" - it is irresponsible...
The teachers we have now, if your asertion is to be believed, teach because they love to teach and don't care about the money - if they did they wouldn't teach, right? How will giving them more money make them better teachers? If you are under the impression that higher salaries might attract people that would be better teachers (a reasonable proposition, IMHO), what will you do with all the lesser teachers that were the best we could previously afford? Are they to be fired or will they simply do the same as always until they retire for a bigger paycheck? It could take 20-30 years to work the majority of all "lesser"/best we could afford teachers out of the system...
The benefit you got wasn't from the subject, it was the manner of instruction ('d argue). I wonder if your dad taught you auto repair if you might not now find yourself making a comfortable living off of that skil set. Or what if he taught you woodworking skills? Plumbing? Electrical work? Masonry?
Your dad took you under his wing and shared something he valued with you for a long time - that is hadly the same as a classroom with 20-30 students of various interest levels being forced to progress at the pace of the slowest students in the class, is it?
The new "bubble degree" is environmental science - it sounds nice, but typically rarely leads to a career & the jobs that there are tend to exist only because of gov't subsidies... Remove the subsidy and the job disappears.
And be just as optional. Requiring a student to study something like shop or programming they aren't interested in and will likely never do anything with outside of class will ruin it for everyone else as the teachers will need to "dumb-down" the class to drag these folks along, causing the more interested students to become frustrated with the pace of the class.
The vast majority of US college graduates fail to comprehend legal obligations (student loans), compound interest (credit cards), and their current political system (OWS)... I suspect there is a similar "life skill gap" in the U.K. - is it reasonable to propel programming ahead of these other skills?
This line of logic reminds me of the OLPC crowd that is throwing money/support behind the idea of dumping laptops in the laps of under-privlidged children around the world to solve some vaugely-defined problem instead of uhm, clean, safe, water, for example...
Why not just require every student study engineering, so that England can become an engineering leader? It's an equally simplistic proposal to solve a problem as the "require everyone to study something only a few will ever work with to solve a vaugely-defined non-existant problem"...
Magical Technology (Score:?) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28, @07:15PM Why can't private industry get it's hands on this magical technology that schools apparently have in the form of self-managing workstations? People imagine you can just turn hundreds of client computers over to K-12 school kids and as long as they don't use Windows they'll never require any management, support, administration...
This despite the coddling these very same folks need to provide the open source computers they and their own children use.
Network infrastructure? It's set and forget.
Five to ten year-old client computers? They never fail, and the kids will take excellent care of those machines (and parents will be delighted that the school district is still using P4 computers with 512M RAM and slowly leaking capacitors...
And of course, you need to filter Internet access? No sweat, the free version of Untangle can take care of that - no need for sophisticated commercial solutions - kids have no interest in working around such filters...
Up next, Khan Academy will remove the need for math teachers...
I'm writing this post from an Acer very low-end notebook that sports a "Sandybridge" Celeron CPU - it is a dual core P4600 with dual cores, HD1000 integrated graphics, etc. and the entire laptop was $229 at Bestbuy - it can take 8 Gigs of DDR3 RAM and performs very nicely according to the Windows Experience Index (mid-5's and above on all ratings). I assume it is a Core i3 that failed some test, but it works just fine for me.
I've also got a small Wolfdale E3400 "Celeron" desktops at home - a dual core Celeron that performs quite nicely, again, I assume it was a CPU that failed certification for higher-spec applications,
There is a long tradition of "binning" parts based on test results - at least as far back as the 80386sx (where a failed math coprocessor section made the chips more affordable), no problem here...
Exactly what problem is this supposed to solve? It reminds me of the scene in Robots (2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0AsgfVIOeQ) where they travel around the big city on a collection of various "rube goldberg" contraptions that seemingly never stop moving...
Now if only I could buy laptops without paying for a windows license..
You can, they just are more expensive and you have much more limited choices.
In most cases the crapware vendors add to laptops drives down the "Windows Tax" to the point where it almost doesn't exist. Personally, I prefer to re-image my laptops with the flavor of Windows I prefer (Win 7 Enterprise at the moment), happily flattening the Windows 7 Home the OEM installed...
Pity you can't distill that down to a poster for Linux to encourage more folks to switch over from Windows!;^)
Seriously, as far as market share goes, Windows Vista has about 6-7x the desktop market share that Linux (all flavors) has, Windows XP has almost 50x as many users, and Mac OS X has around 5x the desktop user base that Linux does...
Linux has been "on the verge" of taking over the market for so long, it is in danger of becoming a has-been technology without ever having been the "hot" technology...
People use computers to solve problems and in many cases to make money. When taken as an entire ecosystem, the Windows Server environment is reasonably priced for the value it offers. Once you get past acquisition cost differences, the included network management tool exceed those available for Linux, and when you factor in the purchase price of Linux management tool the price differential tilts towards Windows in many cases.
The much discussed 'Windows Tax' on computers amounts to about $30-40/year, and for that a home computer user gets a computer running the most popular operating system in the world (by a wide margin), ready access to a large number of pro bono support people (relatives, co-workers, neighbors), they can run almost anything on the shelf at GameStop, best buy, or other retailer, and their computer hardware purchases are typically priced lower than comparable Apple offerings. And bespoke Linux hardware/software offerings (PCs w/ Linux pre-installed typically aren't cheaper than systems on sale at Dell, Best Buy, etc.
Linux is phenomenal at certain tasks, but those tasks represent a small portion of the installed computer base - web & file servers aren't ubiquitous (yet), so it is no surprise that the OS with the largest paid & unpaid support infrastructure, widest support OS application software, and lowest hardware prices is still dominant.
Now, now - he wasn't old at the time - he was within spitting distance of graduate school-age, IIRC. The GPL was created in 1989, at the time RMS was about 36 years old then.
I always marvel at the open-source "advocates" that try and throw the book at the poor company that fails to comply with every aspect of the GPL or other open-source license. What is their goal? To educate the company? A polite letter to the legal dept & board will accomplish that...
NYC Public schools apparently have teachers ont he payroll that the school district feels are too dangerous to put in a room with students - why don't they fire them? Union rules...
3. Change the law so that government agencies can legally poach government contractors as new employees (conservatives: booo) even if there were pre-existing non-poaching agreements.
I've worked a few contractor positions in the private sector and there is ALWAYS an option for the employer to hire away the contractor, typically after a defined period with no penalty (6 months is common around here) - and by penalty is merely a fee to compensate the contractor firm for lost profits on the employee/contractor.
Contractor firms like these arrangements, it makes the contractor position more attractive (likely to go full-time), and the hiring company likes it because they can use contract positions as long-term interviews...
"When the top 100 defense contractors cost taxpayers $306 billion, eliminating the federal contractor middle-man seems like an obvious place to start the austerity measures."
Obviously you have no understanding of why, exactly,there are contractors in these positions in the first place - even with their overhead contractors are typically cheaper than full-time employees, and the rules for hiring and firing contractors are different than full-time workers.
You are also looking at the wrong column - you are looking at Public Debt vs. GDP, not actual dollars. It FY 2000 Clinton & GOP congress trimmed 2.1% of the PUBLIC DEBT (ignoring SS trust fund and other debt not held by public) and in FY 2001 (which started on Oct. 1, 2000) he INCREASED national debt held by public by 0.2%.
Misleading on a few counts, mainly because you break it down by Presidential terms, when it should be broken down by congressional control, since it is Congress, not POTUS, that controls the purse strings.
The NPR story tracks only debt held by public, which is why the current 2010 number on the chart is around $10 Trillion, not the more accurate $14 Trillion that includes debt owed to (for example) the Social Security trust fund.
Slashdot Mirror
The government placing something on your car to record/transmit your location is an "unreasonable search" - the gov't has no right to put anything on your car, be it a bumper sticker or GPS tracker... The fourth ammendment covers unreasonable searches, how does it not apply? Would any person think it reasonable for the gov't to place a tracking (or really ANY) device on your personal property?
What about the GPS tracker example is so exceptional that it is outside the scope of the Constitution?
They also had cannons back then, does the 2nd ammendment cover cannons too?
What?
The quoted poster (who I lacked the will to scroll back far enough to respond to directly) wrote:
That people solely rely on mass media outlets to inform their opinions is not "unconstitutional" - it is irresponsible...
BTW, Rupert Murdoch is a US Citizen, has been for the last 30 years.
The money argument makes no sense.
The teachers we have now, if your asertion is to be believed, teach because they love to teach and don't care about the money - if they did they wouldn't teach, right? How will giving them more money make them better teachers? If you are under the impression that higher salaries might attract people that would be better teachers (a reasonable proposition, IMHO), what will you do with all the lesser teachers that were the best we could previously afford? Are they to be fired or will they simply do the same as always until they retire for a bigger paycheck? It could take 20-30 years to work the majority of all "lesser"/best we could afford teachers out of the system...
The benefit you got wasn't from the subject, it was the manner of instruction ('d argue). I wonder if your dad taught you auto repair if you might not now find yourself making a comfortable living off of that skil set. Or what if he taught you woodworking skills? Plumbing? Electrical work? Masonry?
Your dad took you under his wing and shared something he valued with you for a long time - that is hadly the same as a classroom with 20-30 students of various interest levels being forced to progress at the pace of the slowest students in the class, is it?
The new "bubble degree" is environmental science - it sounds nice, but typically rarely leads to a career & the jobs that there are tend to exist only because of gov't subsidies... Remove the subsidy and the job disappears.
Better to study what, exactly?
College/University is not a trade school, intended to prepare a student for a particular job..
And be just as optional. Requiring a student to study something like shop or programming they aren't interested in and will likely never do anything with outside of class will ruin it for everyone else as the teachers will need to "dumb-down" the class to drag these folks along, causing the more interested students to become frustrated with the pace of the class.
The vast majority of US college graduates fail to comprehend legal obligations (student loans), compound interest (credit cards), and their current political system (OWS)... I suspect there is a similar "life skill gap" in the U.K. - is it reasonable to propel programming ahead of these other skills?
This line of logic reminds me of the OLPC crowd that is throwing money/support behind the idea of dumping laptops in the laps of under-privlidged children around the world to solve some vaugely-defined problem instead of uhm, clean, safe, water, for example...
Why not just require every student study engineering, so that England can become an engineering leader? It's an equally simplistic proposal to solve a problem as the "require everyone to study something only a few will ever work with to solve a vaugely-defined non-existant problem"...
Magical Technology (Score:?)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28, @07:15PM
Why can't private industry get it's hands on this magical technology that schools apparently have in the form of self-managing workstations? People imagine you can just turn hundreds of client computers over to K-12 school kids and as long as they don't use Windows they'll never require any management, support, administration...
This despite the coddling these very same folks need to provide the open source computers they and their own children use.
Network infrastructure? It's set and forget.
Five to ten year-old client computers? They never fail, and the kids will take excellent care of those machines (and parents will be delighted that the school district is still using P4 computers with 512M RAM and slowly leaking capacitors...
And of course, you need to filter Internet access? No sweat, the free version of Untangle can take care of that - no need for sophisticated commercial solutions - kids have no interest in working around such filters...
Up next, Khan Academy will remove the need for math teachers...
Approximately how much of the interstate highway system did the WPA build? How many of out airports? How many piers in our major ports?
The WPA didn't build Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, Rockefeller Center, etc. You are talking out your hat...
I'm writing this post from an Acer very low-end notebook that sports a "Sandybridge" Celeron CPU - it is a dual core P4600 with dual cores, HD1000 integrated graphics, etc. and the entire laptop was $229 at Bestbuy - it can take 8 Gigs of DDR3 RAM and performs very nicely according to the Windows Experience Index (mid-5's and above on all ratings). I assume it is a Core i3 that failed some test, but it works just fine for me.
I've also got a small Wolfdale E3400 "Celeron" desktops at home - a dual core Celeron that performs quite nicely, again, I assume it was a CPU that failed certification for higher-spec applications,
There is a long tradition of "binning" parts based on test results - at least as far back as the 80386sx (where a failed math coprocessor section made the chips more affordable), no problem here...
Exactly what problem is this supposed to solve? It reminds me of the scene in Robots (2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0AsgfVIOeQ) where they travel around the big city on a collection of various "rube goldberg" contraptions that seemingly never stop moving...
Canadian Bacon
You can, they just are more expensive and you have much more limited choices.
In most cases the crapware vendors add to laptops drives down the "Windows Tax" to the point where it almost doesn't exist. Personally, I prefer to re-image my laptops with the flavor of Windows I prefer (Win 7 Enterprise at the moment), happily flattening the Windows 7 Home the OEM installed...
Pity you can't distill that down to a poster for Linux to encourage more folks to switch over from Windows! ;^)
Seriously, as far as market share goes, Windows Vista has about 6-7x the desktop market share that Linux (all flavors) has, Windows XP has almost 50x as many users, and Mac OS X has around 5x the desktop user base that Linux does...
Linux has been "on the verge" of taking over the market for so long, it is in danger of becoming a has-been technology without ever having been the "hot" technology...
People use computers to solve problems and in many cases to make money. When taken as an entire ecosystem, the Windows Server environment is reasonably priced for the value it offers. Once you get past acquisition cost differences, the included network management tool exceed those available for Linux, and when you factor in the purchase price of Linux management tool the price differential tilts towards Windows in many cases.
The much discussed 'Windows Tax' on computers amounts to about $30-40/year, and for that a home computer user gets a computer running the most popular operating system in the world (by a wide margin), ready access to a large number of pro bono support people (relatives, co-workers, neighbors), they can run almost anything on the shelf at GameStop, best buy, or other retailer, and their computer hardware purchases are typically priced lower than comparable Apple offerings. And bespoke Linux hardware/software offerings (PCs w/ Linux pre-installed typically aren't cheaper than systems on sale at Dell, Best Buy, etc.
Linux is phenomenal at certain tasks, but those tasks represent a small portion of the installed computer base - web & file servers aren't ubiquitous (yet), so it is no surprise that the OS with the largest paid & unpaid support infrastructure, widest support OS application software, and lowest hardware prices is still dominant.
Now, now - he wasn't old at the time - he was within spitting distance of graduate school-age, IIRC. The GPL was created in 1989, at the time RMS was about 36 years old then.
I always marvel at the open-source "advocates" that try and throw the book at the poor company that fails to comply with every aspect of the GPL or other open-source license. What is their goal? To educate the company? A polite letter to the legal dept & board will accomplish that...
NYC Public schools apparently have teachers ont he payroll that the school district feels are too dangerous to put in a room with students - why don't they fire them? Union rules...
NY Times article
I've worked a few contractor positions in the private sector and there is ALWAYS an option for the employer to hire away the contractor, typically after a defined period with no penalty (6 months is common around here) - and by penalty is merely a fee to compensate the contractor firm for lost profits on the employee/contractor.
Contractor firms like these arrangements, it makes the contractor position more attractive (likely to go full-time), and the hiring company likes it because they can use contract positions as long-term interviews...
Obviously you have no understanding of why, exactly,there are contractors in these positions in the first place - even with their overhead contractors are typically cheaper than full-time employees, and the rules for hiring and firing contractors are different than full-time workers.
You are also looking at the wrong column - you are looking at Public Debt vs. GDP, not actual dollars. It FY 2000 Clinton & GOP congress trimmed 2.1% of the PUBLIC DEBT (ignoring SS trust fund and other debt not held by public) and in FY 2001 (which started on Oct. 1, 2000) he INCREASED national debt held by public by 0.2%.
These numbers are from your Wikipedia link.
Misleading on a few counts, mainly because you break it down by Presidential terms, when it should be broken down by congressional control, since it is Congress, not POTUS, that controls the purse strings.
The NPR story tracks only debt held by public, which is why the current 2010 number on the chart is around $10 Trillion, not the more accurate $14 Trillion that includes debt owed to (for example) the Social Security trust fund.